Easy listening

STUDENTS should be jealous. Not only do babies get to doze their days away, but they've also mastered the fine art of learning in their sleep.

By the time babies are a year old they can recognise a lot of sounds and even simple words. Marie Cheour at the University of Turku in Finland suspected they might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as when they are awake.

To test the theory, Cheour and her colleagues studied 45 newborn babies in the first few days of their lives. They exposed all the infants to an hour of Finnish vowel soundsone that sounds like "oo", another like "ee", and a third boundary vowel peculiar to Finnish and similar languages that sounds like something in between. EEG recordings of the infants brains before and after the session showed that the newborns could not distinguish between the ...

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